It kind of ruined content too.<p>Why it ruined content? You are not the only one that is searching for the answer to that question. Keep reading to know why SEO ruined content.<p>Many people think that SEO ruined content, in this post, we are goin to explain why SEO ruined content. When you finish reading this post, you will know why SEO ruined content.<p>In the last years we have observed a grown in the quantity of content created, unfortunately, as we are going to explain in a moment, it has been ruined by SEO.<p>¿Is it SEO really the reason content was ruined?<p>Some people argue that SEO is not really the reason content was ruined, we will review all the reason why SEO could be really ruining content.<p>Please, click "next" to know why SEO could be ruining content.
The moment when Google turned to the dark side was in 2005-2006, when they stopped sponsoring the "Web Spam Squashing Summit" and started sponsoring SEO conventions.<p><i>"There's going to be a Web Spam Squashing Summit next week: Thursday, Feb 24th. (2005). Technorati is organizing the event (thanks guys!) and we're hosting it on-site at Yahoo in Sunnyvale. The main goal to get the tool makers in a room together to talk about web spam, share info, and brainstorm. So far AOL, Google, MSG, Six Apart, Technorati, and Yahoo are on board. I hope we'll also have representation from Feedster, WordPress (hi Matt), and Ask Jeeves and/or Bloglines too."</i>[1]<p>The next year, in 2006, Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, addressed the Search Engine Strategies conference.[2]<p><i>"The search advertising market – a tremendous credit to you and to the organization that built this conference..."</i><p>And that's when Google turned evil. From trying to stop search spam, to promoting it.<p>[1] <a href="http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/004256.html" rel="nofollow">http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/004256.html</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.google.com/press/podium/ses2006.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/press/podium/ses2006.html</a>
I totally agree. Google has become useless for about half my searches. It gives me only the biggest, most commercial or most popular results. Anything obscure is impossible to find.<p>I'd like to have a search engine where you get only the most obscure, hard-to-find content. One where you can tweak the kind of content you're looking for, or even switch between different modes: am I just looking for the definition of a common but complex term, am I looking for a specific article that I vaguely remember a phrase from, do I want something I've seen before, or am I in the mood to discover new, unexpected things?<p>Also, I just don't want to see results from some sites. Let me tweak the importance of some sites, rather than relying on Google's gameable algorithms.
If I had one word to characterize the modern web it would be "shallow". SEO and commercialization have led to a world wide web where I can easily find 100 shallow, keyword-optimized articles on "machine learning for IoT" published on high-ranking websites, but not a single page with actual in-depth information about the topic.<p>But there still is great content on the web, it just becomes harder to find in all the noise. I think websites like HN and Reddit and - to some degree - sites like Twitter with their human-based curation are really important for this, so I'm glad they're thriving.
Early SEO efforts were actually good for the web. They forced you to make your content easier to find and more accessible.<p>But then that became the table stakes, and people had to start resorting to dirtier tactics. Or just more annoying ones.<p>During this shelter in place period, I've been reading a lot more recipes online. Every one of them starts with the person's life story. And I get it, maybe how that recipe came to exist is interesting. But at least put a link right at the top that says "skip to recipe" or something. Sometimes I want to read the story, sometimes not. Make it easy for me skip!<p>I put a recipe on my own website, it's literally a .txt file with just the recipe, ingredients right at the top. I posted a picture of the final product on the internet recently, and a friend asked for the recipe, so I sent him the link.<p>He replied "the format and delivery method of this is almost more satisfying than the recipe itself".<p>That's how I know we've gone too far in SEO.
The article linked here has a good point it is trying to make, but makes a number of false points that undercut it's goal.<p>1998 - 2003 was one of the most difficult times to find what you were looking for, even on Google. Many searches for basic information would return results buried in spam pages, pornography, and scams.<p>Deleting old content to manage "crawl budget" is a myth and does not work or help your SEO.<p>The real problems are that Google is directing the bulk of traffic to certain brand name websites. Another real problem is that Google set a simplistic AI with a goal of increasing clickthrough from search results and decreasing bounce rates. This leads to developers building all those top 10 lists where you have to click through each item (harder to bounce that way), and some of the pages that disable the back button in various nefarious ways.<p>I also agree Google should be showing smaller websites more frequently - perhaps optimize for a different goal than the one listed above. More weight on keyword matching perhaps or maybe following only a few "authoritative" users CTR & bounce rate habits.
Wasn't SEO, it was a Google's "Suggest over Search" strategy, followed by the completely predictable bastardization of organic results by internal groups.<p>Biz ops says increasing revenue for [random Google bs] by ranking Y over Z in the results, so it happens. M&A says Rotten Tomatoes won't give us all their data, their users and their firstborns so they won't show up, even on page 2.<p>This is literally what antitrust was created for. Companies do this naturally when they get too successful, it's on us to remind them who pays the bills.<p>By us I mean the US govt so we're basically fucked.
I’d argue that having the internet limited to a handful of gatekeepers, all of whom are sustained by ad dollars, is probably far more responsible for ruining the internet.<p>I find it hard to believe that in a world where Google and Facebook’s users were its customers and not its product, it wouldn’t be able to find a way to combat SEO effectively, especially considering how they are basically hoarding the majority of the smartest people in the world.
I worked in SEO for ages, and it's shady as f.
You can buy links from anyone, the BBC the guardian, the times... It just costs money.
You can ask/force people to take links down (copyright scare, sue, threaten). Fake blogs, we used to run a bunch, some became so popular they became actual blogs on that subject. We'd get money from competitor SEO companies for links on it.
There are tons of niche subjects with no info on the internet. We'd often put it up for SEO purposes.
Wikipedia was started by an SEO company. The rumour was that Wales started it as a cheap way to get high page rank links to sites he owned.
But the rewards were huge. Get a struggling car insurance site from position 11 in Google to position 2 or 1 and their profits would be 10x. They would show us numbers from each advertising sector, SEO, radio, TV, newspapers, etc. Super interesting. Break that down by age / gender ... Very interesting.
No wonder the internet is a shit show. So much money involved and zero regulation.
A MAJOR problem with google is it's assumption that if you search in English you don't care if the top results are American.<p>I've noticed that on google.co.uk, unless you add 'uk' at the end of your search query you'll always get US sites first [1]. Google clearly lump all English based queries into the same geo-graphical bucket - they never used to do this.<p>---<p>[1] Yes, I am logged in, and Google knows where in the world I am.
Just use a different search engine. Right now DDG is the only viable alternative. Just force yourself to use it, regardless of all the edge cases that suck. When DDG becomes as crap as Google, we can use whatever alternative exists at that time to replace it. The same goes for Instagram, it's slowly but surely turned into an ad infested cesspit (Three consecutive ads between user stories? seriously?). This is how the cycle goes I'm afraid.
I think most spam websites today could be filtered out with very simple algorithms. But that would lead to fewer people ending up on these websites and clicking ads. So if your search engine is also an ad network, filtering out spam websites is not in your interest.
I think SEO mainly affects content which was already very low quality. Recipe blogs are a prime example - this is the worst way to get recipes. It is inferior to books and apps (which are more use in the kitchen), is poorly indexed, ephemeral (depending on the wordpress knowledge of the owner), lacks local context, and has none of the rigour and pragmatic advice of something like seriouseats. They deliberately use weird ingredients I find, perhaps to prevent you from falsifying the quality of the recipe and also to differentiate themselves from tried and trusted recipes (which is what most people want!). The instructions you get on the back of the flour packet are superior to recipe blogs, at least they should work for that type of flour.
The article doesn't present complete facts. Regarding zero-sum game, this perhaps was true in the old pagerank algorithm. But I'd believe Google's ranking algorithm has advanced beyond simple keyword density, passing links. What I've noticed is it now gives much more emphasis to user experience. (With metrics like bounce rate meaning the searcher didnt find what he looked for and went back to search results)<p>We all like to shit on Google but there's no search engine even remotely close to the quality of results. Of course, there's a lot of spam associated with SEO, hacking attempts, spam comments, e.t.c. There are side effects of its algorithm of course, that are negative to web.
I really dislike posts like this on HN. It’s essentially whining. The author does not suggest any alternative, does not offer any ideas of their own, and just laments the state of the world.<p>Instead let’s upvote articles on how to build search engines, how search indexing could be improved, how Google’s search works, etc.
Google with default settings is useless and using more sophisticated queries quickly walls off the user with increasingly annoying captcha.<p>The "world's knowledge under you fingertips" motto is still valid and brilliant though. My personal solution is library of OCR-ed PDFs with most established books from various domains, git repository for each domain. Greppable in miliseconds, locally. Hijack this, SEO experts!
I feel like I know enough about the internet that I almost don't need google anymore. (the search algorithm is great, but not the sources it provides)<p>At this point, I have built a set of "sources I trust" and use google as a tool to internally search their websites more than anything else.<p><pre><code> site:source.com "search query"
</code></pre>
Is pretty much how most of my new searches go. If anything, I have stopped trusting 1st page results on google.<p>1st page guitar tabs are the most vanilla chord strum patterns. 1st page recipes are some "americanized - SAHM blog" version of the real thing. 1st page news is a sensationalized link to CNN or Fox, that doesn't quote 1st sources. 1st page game reviews are IGN and 1st page movie reviews are Rotten Tomatoes. For anything more niche google results wikihow or quora, when reddit almost certainly has a better answer somewhere.<p>The 1st page of Google search returns perfectly average results. But, I have stopped expecting any 'perfect' or 'great' results from it.
The situation has gotten so dismal that I often have to look past page 1, and sometimes page 2 of search results.<p>Especially when looking for technical things or reviews on practically anything, the top 5 results are garbage sites (with content written or modified by people with names suggesting an SEO "content" factory in a particular region of the world).
> I remember when it was easy to find logic, facts, and reason on the web. Then, someone optimized it.<p>When was that, exactly? In 1998, when only 3% of the world had access to the web and creating content was limited to a small handful of privileged individuals? This author rails against "Directing the narrative", while building site with a thin sliver of links related to a handful of topics they deem worthy of inclusion. They offer no solutions for an internet that servers 3.5 billion people, choosing instead to whine about how much better the internet was "back in the day."<p>I don't think Google is blameless, but I think they are more of an inevitable byproduct of this many people coming online than they are a root cause.
SEO combined with Amazon (and other) referral revenue opportunities. Combined with human psychology and ignorance outside of the tech community of the wiles of online marketing. Honestly Hacker News is one of the few sources I trust nowadays, and that is of course not implicit. There is a lot of misinformation and a lot of reporting about reporting. A lot of hyperbolic and misleading headlines. Stay safe out there.
Anybody else remember when you could search for a phone number and find legitimate web pages that contained the phone number?<p>We lost that a long time ago.
Content today is written for machines, not for humans.<p>There is no bigger turnoff than coming across waves and waves of listicles and "alternatives to" articles that provide no real insight, beyond dumping a bunch of links, adding 1,000 words of nothing, titling it "Ultimate Beginner's Guide to X in 2020" and calling it a day.<p>Sometimes, to find "actual person" content, I'll add "reddit" to the end of my search query, but that won't be enough, as some enterprising content marketer has decided that they need to rank for those searches too, and created posts like "What reddit thinks about X".<p>SEO is the symptom, not the problem. The problem is that businesses create this kind of low-quality "linkbait" as "inbound marketing", which is getting eyeballs on a page (by whatever means necessary) and upselling their own services. That's why the content feels so soulless.
One might add social media to that list as well. If there's a Dunbar's number in real life, there definitely is one for online communities too. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number</a>
This article is good, but to go a bit deeper, it seems like part of the problem is ultimately capitalism or the commercial nature of the modern internet. As long as there are these incredible incentives to game the system, people are going to do so. And those same incentives apply to Google, since they are advertising driven too. They used to fight more against this stuff, but I think as they've realized they get their cut either way, they're less inclined to do so. And even if they were so inclined, it's sort of asking them hold back the ocean in my view, because the incentives are so stacked against them.
As I see it, maybe 1% of the web is not junk.<p>I think we need an alternative search engine based on community vetting.<p>I.e. you submit your url to the search engine but it isn't present in all search results until a certain number of real people will say it's meaningful and useful. You can do that by only showing it first in 1% of search results and ask people to rate it.<p>You don't have to index 10 billion websites, you just have to index 1 million of useful websites.
SEO effectively means catering to whatever metrics Google happens to be focusing on at the moment. It's supposed to reward "good" content, but there's really no way of automatically judging what's "good" content so Google relies on all these other methods that are open to abuse.<p>Whatever way Google rates websites has a direct effect on the web itself. In a way they're a victim of their own success.
I hate SEO. Google's ranking algorithm is basically an accretion of scar tissue built from years of SEO bullshit mitigations. If you make a ranking algorithm that does right by the user, and you're successful, it won't be long before SEOs come along and poison the well.
> erasing the past<p>Wouldn't it make sense to archive the old articles and put no-crawl rule on them? Deleting just seems extreme no matter how you look at it. That being said - content that is controlled by such people is probably not worth keeping.
So, someone pays a lot of money hiring people to farm content repeating the same meaningless expressions again and again, to get some visitors from Google so they can show them some adds and make money.<p>Wouldn't it be more productive to hire people to write meaningful and interesting content? That way they wouldn't just have visitors tricked to come from Google but also a constant following.<p>The only reason I see for junk content is lack of imagination.
That's exactly why you're seeing this new generation of startups who are building high-fidelity content through their own work and crowd-sourcing (like AskFinny for personal finance), because you can't trust Google any more--full of affiliate-led promotions.
I'm actually really glad to have seen this and the comments. This has something I've been prattling on about to anyone who will listen for the last couple of years now. Glad to be somewhat vindicated!